While I know it has nothing to do with school, I’m sitting here at Berlin City, waiting for my free oil change to complete.  While I’m excited for the holiday season, I can tell that my fellow waiting room peers aren’t sharing in my sentiment.  They are complaining to each other, and once the people stopped interacting with each other, they pick up their phones and start bitching to whomever the unlucky recipient is on the other end of the radio waves.  We’re all waiting and it takes longer then it should, but most of us are here getting service for free.  We need not complain.  We are distributing the Grinch with each new contact we make in our unhappy states.  The people on the other end of these phone calls will agree with me, as I imagine that the mechanics doing the work will.  Most the guys here are young, probably just getting started in their careers and are taking their time to make sure its done right.  Let’s not take out our scrooge attitudes on the people who don’t deserve it.  Golden rule applies, even when it is hard to follow.

While I may be one of the biggest scrooges out there, I don’t like my luke warm love of Christmas taint the feeling of others.  If they want to me merry, be merry!  If they are celebrating some other holiday, insert appropriate greeting here.  My holiday spirit is different then most, so enjoy the good will I’m trying to extend, take a deep breath, and relax.

Now I want to be clear, I’m not overloaded with school or work or my social life, but rather all 3.  They are becoming more and more mutually exclusive the more that work is creeping in and eating up my spare time.  The problem I have, if you want to call it a problem, is that I love what I do.  I don’t dread going into work.  I dread getting up in the morning as I tend to stay up way too late, but helping customers and using my brain to unravel issues is awesome.  Those issues could be something overly technical in nature like why one T1 in a multilink is dropping and taking down the rest of the Ts in that bundle, to figure out what a person is actually reporting wrong.  I think that is the biggest challenge I face to trying to figure out all the different lingo a person outside of my industry uses to describe their problem.  Hell even in my own industry the lingo will differ between companies, even departments in some cases.  But its the ability to take all the data I have and manipulate it into something that makes sense to me to do my job.  In turn I need to take that data and pass it along to other people.  Again this could be techs inside Sovernet, or to people who are just baffled at how their phones could possible work over an internet connection.

So now comes my real dilemma, do I sign up for the 5 classes on my study plan, or do I try to rework it so that I can spread the courses out more.  I feel that I’m most productive when I’m over loaded, but I think I’m finally approaching that breaking point.  In the past my mind was devoted to school about 30% of the time and 30% to work and 40% to social activities.  Lately it seems more like my mind is 60% work, 30% social and 10% school.  Somehow I’m over full and I can’t stop stealing time from school to make up for my need to focus on work.  While I do justify it as where my money comes from, I know that if I keep up this pace I will burn myself out.  I’ve seen plenty of co-workers go through it and seen them sizzle like an egg on a heatsink.  I want to be done school, not because I don’t enjoy learning or because it takes too much of my time, but because I don’t want to keep worrying about it holding me back.  I went through this when I lived in Mass, I only had an AAS degree and it wasn’t good enough to hold a candle to most people applying for jobs down there.  Now that I have my BS and some good experience on my resume, I feel like I can go anywhere.  Anywhere that is within range of the Gradcenter, till I finish my degrees.  Again, its not that I feel the need to leave and go somewhere else and do something else, its that feeling of being stuck in a pattern that I can’t get out of if I wanted to. 

Scared of my obligations I guess you could say.  I have a great idea of where I want to be in the future and I don’t want to see myself end up being like some many others who complain that they can’t do what they want to because they are tied down with a house and bills and a family being forced to do a job they don’t like.  I don’t want to be in this job when I’m burned out, coming home to my wife, 1.8 kids, house, dog, whatever and feeling like I can’t change because I’m in over my head.  I want that feeling that no matter what I’m doing, I’m happy with it and the rest is all secondary concerns.  But then again, isn’t that what everyone wants?

Ok enough of my rambling, time to turn in and try to get into the holiday spirit with my first X-Mas party tomorrow.

While I was writing a few of my posts this evening I began wishing that I could pull off my shelf a few books that I need to continue to read.  I started my book collection back in 2000 when my girlfriend bought me a copy of HG Wells’ Time Machine and War of the Worlds.  Being very disappointed in my Christmas gift, I set them aside till a week later when I figured I’d at least read through them to humor her gift that she obviously put thought into.  A few hours later I had finished both books. 

They were different and not what I was used to getting from my internet surfing that I had become so used to.  There was something appealing about his writing and how his logic made sense while not getting too deep into how things work.  I didn’t doubt for one moment while I was reading that time travel was entirely possible.  I then dug out one of the books I stole from my brother a long time ago and decided it was finally time to read it.  The Hobbit again was such a great read and filled my head with images that no video or game could do.

Every time we take a trip somewhere we look for old book stores as you never know when you will find a hidden treasure or two.  Just this past weekend she found me a first edition copy of Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams.  Once this semester is over I’m diving into that book for the 10+ time and finishing up the classic Sherlock Holmes series of books.